Some companies are eliminating remote work or “telecommuting” because they believe their people must share the same physical space to collaborate.
I define collaboration as “working together to create value while sharing virtual or physical space.” But apparently some organizations want to get more physical rather than virtual.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal story, companies including IBM, Aetna, Bank of America, Best Buy and Reddit have ended or reduced remote-work arrangements as managers “demand more collaboration, closer contact with customers—and more control over the workday.”
Companies facing challenges are often the first to scrap or reduce remote work programs. In 2013, as Yahoo was struggling, then CEO Marissa Mayer defended her decision to eliminate work from home. Speaking at the Great Place to Work conference in Los Angeles, Mayer reportedly said “People are more productive when they’re alone, but they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.”
No question people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together, but the point is people can be together virtually as well as physically. Many tools and technologies support high-impact virtual collaboration. Forcing people to endure a daily commute and interfering with their life/work balance reinforces command and control and disrupts collaboration and innovation. Also, remote work lets companies tap expertise regardless of geography. And teams are often comprised of people in multiple regions, so forcing people to work from a company location is unlikely to enhance collaboration within a team. It does make sense to encourage remote workers to spend some time at company locations to spark chance encounters in cafeterias, corridors and break rooms with people outside their teams.
Command and control culture is the opposite of collaborative culture so an organization trying to control team members by keeping them at the workplace short circuits collaboration. Ironically, my research interest in collaboration began in the mid-1990s when I was writing a book on personal videoconferencing. Early telecommuting programs experimented with PC-based videoconferencing so that remote workers could look each other in the eye and talk with colleagues while they were collaboratively working on spreadsheets, documents, design plans and other work. The issue then was whether we could collaborate as effectively at a distance as we could in the same room.
By the time I wrote The Culture of Collaboration book, the tools and technologies supporting remote work had become pervasive and the culture supporting virtual collaboration had become widespread. People at many organizations were becoming accustomed to collaborating spontaneously from almost anywhere. So the challenge was changing. I wrote:
“Today we struggle to collaborate as effectively at a distance as we do in the same room. Tomorrow the challenge becomes the reverse.”
This is because same-room collaboration tools were lagging behind those used at a distance and people were becoming more accustomed to collaborating from applications on their notebook and laptop computers. Also, “presence” technology provided the capability to find colleagues, check their availability and begin collaborating with them on the fly from anywhere.
Spontaneity and organizational culture supporting ad hoc encounters is critical to creating value collaboratively. In some cultures, this means it’s okay to grab people out of meetings or interrupt their work for on-the-fly collaboration. But in mature companies walking back remote work, often this level of spontaneity is a cultural faux pas. So the most effective way to spontaneously connect in these cultures is often through online chat which can escalate into a collaborative group session (CGS). Organizations create far greater value by moving away from command and control and instead enabling team members to connect and collaborate spontaneously regardless of physical location.
As I demonstrate in my book The Bounty Effect, exigent circumstances including disruptive market forces, new competitors, or a regional slowdown are opportunities to accelerate collaboration and emerge stronger from the challenge. Eliminating remote work because of a difficult environment rarely enhances collaboration and instead increases command and control. The more effective approach is to seize the opportunity exigent circumstances provide and adopt a more collaborative organizational structure and culture which transcend physical location.
